Not too long ago, there were plastics manufacturers, a well-staffed vehicle assembly line, and, it’s safe to say, bookkeepers. What do all of these jobs have in common? While they could theoretically find employment today, they are among the 70% of middle-class jobs largely lost to automation since 1980.

However, too much attention is paid to the jobs lost to automation, while manual processes too often hold workers back without comment. Here are some ways manual processes are overwhelming employees and what you can do about it.

1. Maintaining Accuracy

It is not only difficult but impossible to maintain 100% accuracy across an entire enterprise. If you have multiple employees handling data entry, analytics, reporting, and other processes every day, mistakes are bound to happen.

Therefore, manual processes are not ideal for maintaining high levels of accuracy. When it comes to critical data, like financial reporting or safety-related data, small mistakes can have enormous consequences. 

Consequently, this puts a lot of undue stress on employees and employers alike. Employees fear negative performance reviews or disciplinary actions for their mistakes, while employers fear the inevitable consequences or inaccuracies.

2. Lowering Employee Satisfaction

We spend at least 40 hours a week at our jobs, so it’s no surprise that job satisfaction is a critical measure of our stress levels, mental health, physical health, and more. Did you know that job satisfaction is highly correlated with lifespan? That should tell you a lot about how much stress can impact your life.

One of the most common factors that affect someone’s job satisfaction is the meaning they find in their work. Therefore, if employees feel their day is filled with busy work that a computer could easily replace, this can lower job satisfaction. Other factors include employees worrying about job security with automation, their errors, and more.

Overall, if employees dread coming to work every day, this will ultimately lead to lower job performance, retention rates, and productivity.

3. Higher Costs

Employees expect a livable wage, a reasonable benefits package, and good working conditions. All of these will cost your enterprise money, and serve as the largest ongoing expense for most organizations.

Unfortunately, when you spend most of your resources on unproductive and inefficient manual processes, your bottom line suffers. Of course, this impacts your business, employees, and customers.

What’s the Solution?

To save money on routine processes, improve your employee’s job satisfaction, and complete a better and more accurate end product, you need to embrace automation to some extent.

Don’t take it from us. Ask your employees. Believe it or not, 60% of workers worldwide believe that AI-powered automation will lead to higher job fulfillment.

With the astounding advancements in AI over the last decade, businesses need to either learn to embrace automation or watch their competition surpass them. When it comes to increasing productivity, accuracy, and your bottom line, there’s no better option.

However, automation is not all created equal. Popular language models make the news for their impressive tricks, but they have limited capabilities for a large enterprise. Let’s talk about how to find the right application for your needs.

Choosing Automation That Meets Your Needs

When choosing automation for your company, you want an application that offers the best value for the expense. For that, you’ll need workflow automation that you can control and adapt to your changing workflow.

Too many programs handle specific tasks for a marked-up fee. Conversely, the right workflow program can automate your processes across multiple platforms, tenants, users, and more.

Moreover, if you choose a programmable platform, you can easily define your own rules, tasks, microservices, and more. If you don’t have a software engineer on staff, don’t worry. You can use a low-code, graphical designer after taking a short training. From there, the sky is the limit!

Stop Overwhelming Your Employees Today

Clearly, too many manual processes will overwhelm employees for many reasons. Regardless, a lack of automation helps nobody in your enterprise, especially not your employees or your customers. With the right tools, you can improve accuracy, productivity, and job satisfaction all around.

Keep reading our blog for our latest business solutions, and learn which features FlowWright can offer your employees today!